Tenacity wants you to kill. It wants you to murder the part of you that shrugs and pretends not to care.

In my case it was Crohn’s disease. I’ve had my disease since I was 12. I’ve also had a newly diagnosed seizure disorder that has made chaos of my life. Very recently I’ve also been diagnosed with a halial hernia and due to not affording the surgery to fix it, I threw up and aspirated (Crohn’s disease may have been the vomiting problem too–I’ll be sick forever).

But that’s not the courage I’ve needed. That throwing up caused me to have pneumonia 3 or 4 times in as many months, and tenacity helped saved me this time. Being tenacious has kept me from jumping off a bridge after throwing up blackish-red blood vomit. It’s why I’m writing this.

And this very last go at it I was prompted to shrug it off and just let it go–do or (maybe) die. But I killed that part of me, changed my attitude from one of perpetual sickness to one of killing the lassitude that existed inside me. I will always be sick. Crohn’s disease and seizures and hernias, oh my. But being tenacious got me through it this time.

One can never tell a movie by simply seeing a part of it. For instance I can never tell a movie from simply seeing a part of The Lord of the Rings: Part Two or Three or whatever. Gandalf comes back seemingly inexplicably, and white, and Frodo has an invisibility cloak. Guys with weird metal masks?

Also I just got my catheter out and I’m still in the pulmonary unit, so everyone agrees that I look much better than yesterday when I had a temperature of 103 or 104 degrees and my oxygen was 84 or so. I don’t remember much of that, such as actually getting the catheter put in, and also being strapped down to the bed with leather tie belts because I was apparently​ uncooperative with the process.

So I have pneumonia again, caused by my halial hernia. I’ve been short of breath for a while at home and had been warned not to sleep on my left side, and I’ve been given the suggestion of surgery for the hernia and which I had taken under deep, deep consideration and decided no, nope. So I took Prilosec – which doesn’t work forever – and eventually I threw up due to whatever sickness I would have had that would have made me throw up since I have at least 3 at least (at last count) and of course I aspirated and got pneumonia. I remember the vomit being dark brown. It was quite thick too.

Right now I’m sitting in a hospital room, waiting for a different hospital room to be transferred to because everyone on Earth is sick, apparently, just like when that little Goblin guy in Lord of the Rings: Part Two or Three or Whatever Gets obsessed-sick when he doesn’t have the ring. We all have a ring, a sickness, a darkness; oh yeah, there’s lightness and hope and not-dying, but there is more darkness than some of us would like in some of our lives.

I’m sick again. It never ends. It never will. It’s an existential structure of my Being. Drugs, tests, money, depression, fun, luck: what kind of and when will I get cancer and die? The ontological sickness of my Being brings me to the very core of who I am, of what I am, and how I am. It makes me question my very Being, which is unthinkable. The end of my life is incomprehensible.

Despite writing about this multiple times, I’m not obsessed with being sick or otherwise being overly worried about it. I don’t have (nor want) any damn ring to rule them all. I’m writing this because I’m in the hospital and I want people to know that you can be really sick, forever, have it be a part of yourself, and still live.

Life as a multitudes of doings; this is my doing.

Still living.

Anxiously.

Also the quotes from The Lord of the Rings we’re obviously because they were on the hospital television. I apologize.

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This blog is focused on being creative: it helps me think and reflect on life (even). There's definitely people on here who have issues that surpass me--there's no words for it--but here I am trying to start something, anything.